​Israeli Supreme Court to hear war crimes case against top officials – report

In a unique hearing next week, the Israeli Supreme Court will be presented with a petition that reportedly contains evidence implicating a number of high ranking officials in war crimes during military operations in Lebanon and Gaza, Al Jazeera reports.

For the first time in history the Israeli judiciary on April 2
will hear evidence against top officials blamed for committing
war crimes in Lebanon and Gaza, according to the report.

The Supreme Court will be presented with a 52-page petition
outlining Israel’s alleged crimes in three operations in Lebanon
in summer 2006, Operation Cast Lead in Gaza in late 2008, and an
attack on a humanitarian aid flotilla in May 2010.

The hearing will focus on “strong factual and legal
findings” from public sources, including reports of Israeli
official inquiries, that may implicate a number of high-ranking
military and political heavyweights including Former Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert and current Justice Minister Tzipi Livni
among others.

The charges are being brought by a Palestinian lawyer and former
senior prosecutor at The Hague, Marwan Dalal. His evidence
reportedly includes statements from senior Israeli officials
where they allegedly implicate themselves in such crimes as
unjustified killings, collective punishment and attacks on
civilian infrastructure.

Dalal and his human rights group Grotius, believe that such
actions breach the Fourth Geneva Convention as well as Israeli
law. Furthermore Dalal will try to convince the court on that
Israeli police are required to investigate the evidence for
possible indictments for war crimes.

“The evidence is in the public realm and obliges Israeli
prosecutors to order investigations,” he said. “The
failure to do so is unreasonable conduct and the court must
rectify the matter.”

Besides Olmert and Livni, the petition also implicates two former
military chiefs of staff, a former domestic intelligence chief
and a former minister of defence.

There is factual evidence of war crimes contained in official
Israeli reports produced by the Winograd inquiry into the 2006
Lebanon war and the two Turkel inquiries into the 2010 attack on
the aid flotilla, according to Dalal’s petition. For more
evidence, the lawyer also closely studied the results of
UN-appointed investigations, including the Goldstone commission
into the attack on Gaza in late 2008, and two commissions, led
respectively by Karl Hudson-Philips and Geoffrey Palmer, into the
flotilla attack.

“There has been no discussion in Israel of the responsibility
of high-ranking officials for issuing apparently illegal orders
such as using white phosphorus in built-up areas, the adoption of
flexible open-fire regulations, and a policy of targeting certain
population groups, such as males over a certain age,” Sarit
Michaeli, a spokeswoman for B'Tselem, an Israeli human rights
group, told Al Jazeera.

Israel's stated that the objective of the 2008 Gaza War, also
known as Operation Cast Lead was to stop rocket fire into Israel
and weapons smuggling into the Gaza strip. But Palestinians claim
children were being used as human shields while hospitals were
also targeted during the 23-day conflict. Overall more than 1,400
Palestinians died in the Israeli operation, including more than
300 children. The IDF was accused of a disproportionate response
to Hamas rocket attacks, but there were no criminal convictions
following that military operation.